


The Attractions of Youth

by aster_risk



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, First Time, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Shameless Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-04-23 07:56:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14328030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: After a long drive through the desert and a stop in a tiny ghost town, Mulder and Scully get hot and sticky on the side of the road.(Three chapters, all of them smut.)





	1. Chapter 1

The Cadillac sputters violently past rows of shriveled juniper. Scully leans her head on the open window, seeking in the wind a reprieve from unending desert heat. The speedometer broke eighty somewhere past the last gas station, as the cacti turned to sagebrush, and the sagebrush turned to conifers. The rockies loom blue before them, an endless ridgeline slicing across their windshield.

 

She picks open the buttons on her blouse and eyes the sweat stains on her cotton tank top, blooming beneath her breasts. The temperature only climbs higher; her bra feels more constricting by the minute. The AC is shit, and even if it wasn’t, the gas stations are too few and far between to waste fuel on air conditioning. Not when they’re driving this fast, and they haven’t seen another car since God knows when. All she can do is throw her arm out the window like an Old Western damsel waving a handkerchief and let the desert air wick the sweat from her skin.

 

“Scully, you feeling alright?” Mulder turns to her with concern in his eyes and a slick forehead. He’d thrown his tie in the back seat hours ago, but the suit still looks like it’s suffocating him. She turns her head slightly, just enough to meet his eyes. Her red hair flutters wildly behind her.

 

“S’hot,” she mumbles.

 

He chuckles. “No shit.” His hand rests on her thigh, large and callused, rubbing little circles with his thumb.

 

“Where’s this town again?”

 

“Other side of the mountains. We’ve got a couple hours.”

 

She groans and scooches further out the window.

 

“Don’t fall out. If you haven’t noticed, there’s no hospital nearby.” His voice is playful, but there’s a husky undertone to it.

 

She glowers at him. “You’re a riot.”

 

“I aim to please,” he chirps. He shoots her that charming grin, hazel eyes crinkled and lower lip popped out, and if she hasn’t melted already that does it. He’s soft and lopsided, with the face of a puppy and the jawline of a magazine model.

 

His hand leaves her thigh—she has to stop herself from holding it there—and reaches into the bag of sunflower seeds in the cupholder. He roots around, picking out a couple, and the salt sticks to his fingers as he pops them between his teeth. Does he know the effect that has on her? (Probably.)

 

A bead of sweat runs down her chest, pooling in the fold of her tank top. She wonders if all the hot weather in Wyoming is bearing down on her, gathering in the space between her thighs where her sweat has slicked the leather seat. She squirms, unsticking her ass from the chair with a distinct pop. She tries to ignore Mulder’s subtle glance her way, staring out the windshield at the shimmer of heat on asphalt.

 

It’s been going on for months now, this dance of compliments and heady stares. She could cut the sexual tension with a butter knife, that’s how fast they’d give if an opportunity arose. He hasn’t touched her hair since he kissed her on New Year’s Eve, too chastely to have satiated either of them. If he does, she thinks they might lunge at each other like they’re eighteen again and wasted on a Tuesday night, making out in semi-public closets and fucking frantically in the back seats of cars.

 

It wouldn’t take much for them for fuck in the back seat of this car, she muses, affording herself some leeway. It’s easy to get hot and bothered in a place like this.

 

“Hhm!” she squeaks when his hands settles again on her upper thigh. If he heard, he gives no indication. His fingers are too close to the ache between her legs—no closer than they’ve ever been, but she feels jump-started at their touch. Her quads clench.

 

“Hey Scully, check it out.” He points out the front.

 

She squints at the block-letters printed on the ratty billboard as they approach. “One eight hundred find Jesus,” she reads aloud, eyeing him skeptically.

 

“Not that, the sign below it—there’s a town coming up, with food. I think lunch is a little more pressing than cleansing our souls right now, Scully.”

 

 _I don’t know, my soul might need a good cleansing after this trip_ , she thinks, squeezing her thighs tighter together. “Are we there?”

 

“No, it’s not the old mine town. We haven’t reached the mountains yet.” Oh. Right.  It’s not as if she’s been paying attention.

 

“Where are we?”

 

He reads the exit sign as they pass. “Scipio, Utah.”

 

The speed limit drops to twenty, and the heat starts to suffocate. She furrows her brows and looks out the window again, leaning on her arm. Middle of Nowhere is an understatement to describe this place. They pass a run-down Citgo gas station, its parking lot empty but for a yellow pickup. It’s the kind of place grown men go missing from, then turn up to two months later high as a kite claiming aliens abducted them.

 

Behind the gas station is the saddest petting zoo she’s ever seen, with a single dusty zebra and two emus trotting listlessly about the joint pen. A donkey sleeps in the dirt, its knees folded beneath it. Wheat grasses line the road, three feet high and bent into the breeze.

 

Then, a pale green stucco shack of a restaurant, with fluorescent light bulbs dancing along its roof and a sign over the door that read ‘Eduardo’s Authentic Mexican Drive-In.’ Pulling into its near-deserted parking lot, Mulder wiggles his eyebrows and shoots her the finest shit-eating grin she’s ever seen. Fitting, given the shit they’re about to eat here.

 

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

 

He pouts. “You don’t want a margarita?”

 

“I don’t want a food-borne disease,” she retorts, rolling her eyes. She hops out of the car anyway, because if Eduardo’s Drive-In is the best food in Scipio, she doesn’t want to know the meals that await them when they reach their destination.

 

The door creaks in a way no glass door should when they walk in, and a dying bell tinkles at their arrival. The counter looks like someone painted a McDonalds with the Southwestern sunset, the whole interior an onslaught of pinks and scarlets and tangerines that anywhere else would be breathtaking. She wrinkles her nose at the smell of cheap taco meat and enchilada sauce.

 

For his part, Mulder looks thrilled. Maybe it’s the hours on the road; maybe it’s his steel digestive system. He can afford to overlook the consequences of highwayside taquitos if they taste reasonably good. Scully doesn’t have that luxury.

 

“Can I have two chicken tacos, a Diet Coke, and… Scully what do you want? It’s on the Bureau.”

 

She cocks her eyebrow, arms crossed over her chest. “Do they sell Margaritas?”

 

The bony, frayed lady at the counter nods. “Small, medium, or—”

 

“Large,” Scully says.

 

“And a large margarita,” repeats Mulder. “To go.”

 

The woman disappears into the back. When they bring out her margarita, it sloshes around a plastic soft-drink cup, lid and straw and all. She sucks on it and lets the alcohol burn her throat. At least it’s cold. At least it isn’t Mulder’s sloppy tacos stuffed into a paper bag.

 

They carry their goodies to the car. Mulder plops down in the driver’s seat, balancing a bag of awful Tex-Mex on his lap. “Whaddya say we get out of here, Scully? This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

 

She nods, taking another gulp of her drink. She can taste the shitty margarita mix, feel the tingle setting into her forehead and the flush in her cheeks. Mulder peels out of Scipio, and the wind picks up again. She leans back in the seat, closing her eyes and letting the rush of air and her imminent drunkenness engulf her.

 

“I’m pulling over,” says Mulder, getting off the highway only two exits from Scipio, Utah, down some lonely desert road. At least they’re in the foothills now, tanned rock jutting up from mounds of sun-stripped sand and juniper.

 

She raises her head. “Why?”

 

“So I can eat two-handed.”

 

He pulls into the dirt; the Cadillac comes to a sputtering halt. She’s sufficiently buzzed now, her stomach burning and the rest of her pleasantly cool. She clings to her margarita, the melted ice watering it down. She pinches the straw, drawing out another sip.

 

“Can I have some of that?” Mulder looks at her margarita like it could cure cancer. She passes it to him.

 

“Don’t finish it.” Her words are crisp still, but her tone is slow and heady. She hands him the drink, her palms chilly and wet with condensation. She watches him take the staw between his lips. A bead of sweat slips down his forehead. He closes his eyes in pure bliss as the cold hits his tongue. A moan of relief escapes him.

 

She feels like she should cover her eyes. Maybe it’s the alcohol, but she can feel her sex tighten at the sound of him. She can’t help but wonder— _is this how he sounds when he orgasms?_  She’s not full-on drunk yet, can’t write off her taut nipples beneath her cotton tank top as intoxication. Well. Maybe she can can call it intoxication, but it’s not the cheap margarita that has her squirming in her seat. She presses her thighs together, pinches between them just once, discreetly. Just to ride the little wave and keep herself in check.

 

Mulder sets the drink in the cup holder. She looks up at him, and the quirk of his lips says it all. He saw that; he saw her fingers slip into her legs and touch herself over her pencil skirt, however briefly. He holds her gaze, his eyes warm and smoky, his inviting mouth wet with cocktail from a soda cup. He tries to hide it when his gaze flicks momentarily to her breasts. Her nipples are straining against her shirt, and there’s no pretending it’s a chill. She dares a downward glance. His erection strains against his pants, hard as a rock. Suddenly, kissing feels inevitable. Necking, feeling, fucking, they had it coming. They’ve been stretching apart like a rubber band, and eventually they have to snap back together.

 

She kisses him over the cupholders, winding her arm around his shoulders and her fingers through his hair. At first, he cups her cheeks like she’s the most precious thing in the world. Then, his hands roam to her breasts, fingering her shirt, asking for permission.

 

“Yes,” she whispers. “Please.”

 

He pushes down her neckline, eases the straps of her shirt and bra down her shoulders as she moans into his lips. Somehow, he’s fondling her breasts as if he’s never seen a woman naked, yet skilled enough to flutter over her erect nipples before his deft fingers settle on her hips. Her tongue grazes his teeth for a moment, and she moves her lips to his neck.

 

“Maybe,” Mulder gasps, “maybe we should stop.”

 

She extracts herself from his arms, her mouth popping off the sensitive skin of his throat. “Do you want to stop?”

 

“Scully,” he says breathlessly, “I want to fuck you so well that it makes up for the six years I didn’t. But there’s not a lot of room here.”

 

 _I want to fuck you._  At those words, she shoves her seat forward violently. Her shirt is bunched up at her waist, her breasts bare to the noonday sun. She doesn’t realize how wet she was until she spreads her legs in the seat and climbs into the back. She’s clenching, desperately, the friction of her panties leaving her so slick it’s almost embarrassing. Her skin feels electric; the sensation of her panties against her wetness tingles in her fingertips.

 

“Then fuck me, Mulder. Fuck me in the back seat.” She throws his tie onto the floor. As Mulder climbs into the back, his pants tent so tightly she’s sure they’ll burst. He freezes, his jaw stiff, with one foot in the driver’s seat and the other midair. He maneuvers around his erection, his muscles tightening every time it brushes the zipper of his pants.

 

She looks at him, fumbling clumsily toward her, his five o’clock shadow and awkward nose and friendly smile lines. His shirt is still tucked into his pants. She loves him, God, how she loves him. She reaches for his collar and pulls him toward her, unbuttoning his shirt. It needs to go, as long as her bra sits around her hips. He kisses her hungrily, with a frenzy, a certainty that wasn’t there the first time. He knows, now, how badly she wants him.

 

He spreads her legs open, slides his hands up her thighs, and she groans. His fingers press against her labia, rub soft circles cross her sex over her underwear, and how it feels so good over two layers of clothing is a mystery. His cock rubs her leg, still straining against his trousers.

 

“Mulder,” she breaks the kiss. “I need—” His thumb presses her clit, and she arches her back over the car door. “I need you inside me.” Another wave of pleasure. “Now,” she gasps.

 

He fumbles with his zipper. She presses her lips to his collarbone, his bare shoulder as he works his pants off and tosses them to the floor. She lifts her arms over her head, and taking the cute, he pulls her shirt and bra off the rest of the way. She aches; there’s no time for total nudity. She hoists her skirt up above her waist and pulls her panties to her knees. He maneuvers between her legs.

 

She grasps his cock, her hand sliding down it. Her other hand works her clitoris, presses into her folds. She takes him in both hands then, letting her wetness lubricate him. She looks him dead in the eye, relishing the groan that rumbles in his chest and the way he squeezes his eyes shut as she runs her hand along his shaft. His hands grip the seat.

 

Enough dragging this out. She reaches for his waist, her legs open and waiting. He slips his arms around her, pulls her toward him, and she slides onto him in one fluid motion. Oh.  _Oh._  “Oh,” she gasps, her nose bumping against his. She wraps her legs around him, her underwear dangling off her ankle. He pulls out slightly and thrusts into her, snapping his hips into hers.

 

“God, Scully, you feel amazing. You’re so beautiful.”

 

“Keep going.” She whimpers as he thrusts again, quick and full and deep, and she can’t quite wrap her head around the fact that it’s Mulder, gripping her ass, brushing his lips against her cheek. It’s  _Mulder,_  moving inside her, filling her, in this half-drunk explosion of lust and love and everything in between.

 

He picks up the rhythm, drilling into her, and her back slams into the door. If it hurts, she doesn’t feel it. “Yes,” she begs, “faster. More.” She’s so tight, so swollen, so close that her hands are trembling.

 

“Scully, I’m not gonna last,” he huffs, pulling her into him again. For a second, they’re dead still. She’s taken him fully inside her; their taut abdominal muscles exhale into each other. Her feet press into his calves, her thighs into his hipbones.

 

She begins to rub circles over her clit, working it fast, and he can’t take his eyes off the insistent pulse of her forearm. Grunting, he picks up the pace again, pushing and pulling and tangling awkwardly together in the cramped space. They’re frantic now, desperate, a knot of limbs and primal noises.

 

She feels his orgasm before he breathes out, before he shudders and moans. She was wrong; the sound is far more sensual, far more attractive than she had surmised as he sipped her margarita. Working herself quicker, she tumbles over the edge only seconds after Mulder, with an fervid, high-pitched cry she didn’t know her lungs could produce. It seems to last forever, her walls clenching around Mulder’s cock, her body shaking and her head thrown back on the seat.

 

“Mulder!” she screams as she comes, drawing it out on her tongue. Who will hear her, beyond ghosts and sagebrush?

 

As she settles, Mulder pulls out slowly, pulling his boxers and pants back up. “Love you, Scully,” he murmurs. She cracks one eye open. She isn’t supposed to hear it, but it tugs her heartstrings.

 

She appreciates him from where she sits, still naked but for her bunched up skirt. “I love you too, Mulder.” She kisses him, softer this time. She savors the taste of alcohol on his lips.

 

“You know, I didn’t intend for this to happen…” he glances around them. “Well, here.”

 

She can’t suppress her warm, post-coital smile. “Things don’t happen normally for us, Mulder, in case you haven’t noticed. That was magnificent.”

 

He shoots her a goofy grin, before climbing back into the driver’s seat. “What do you say we try to beat it, when we get to the hotel?”

 

She doesn’t move, not just yet. The ignition starts. The Cadillac putters back to the highway. On the floor, his necktie catches her eye. “I wouldn’t be opposed to that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: Scipio is a real town with a real petting zoo. I've seen it with my own eyes. No Mexican drive-in, though. 
> 
> Title of this work comes from the song "The Attractions of Youth" by Barns Courtney. This is part of my ongoing project, a collection of unrelated stories named after every song in his album of the same name.


	2. Part 2- Wall Slapping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens after they arrive at the motel. Also porn.

It was Mulder’s idea. When the noise started, Scully was innocently brushing her teeth in the questionably stained sink, her hair wrapped in a towel and her body in a plush bathrobe. Her own bathrobe, thank you very much. She wouldn’t touch the sheer cotton things in the motel closet with a ten foot pole. And she absolutely wasn’t just being squeamish—Dana Scully cut up dead bodies for a living.

 

At any rate, she was perfectly content until the squeak of awful bed-springs and the chorus of breathy moans started above them. _Ungh, Ungh, Christy, yeeeeeeesss,_  breached the ceiling of their room.  _Right there Ricky, right there. Oh, oh oh Ricky._

 

Scully wrinkled her nose and spat out her toothpaste. “Ugh,” she muttered at the variety of questionable noises that only increased in volume.

 

From the bed— “thin walls, huh Scully?” Mulder sat on the bed with a case file propped up on his knees. His reading glasses sat askew on his nose as he thumbed through the pages— lights in the sky, quaint town in bumfuck nowhere, crappy motel with a half-lit vacancy sign the color of a cartoon alien. The whole shabang.

 

“No shit,” said Scully. She padded out of the bathroom, dropping her towel on the easy chair. Hideous as it was, that chair was probably the least tainted piece of furniture in their room. She plopped unceremoniously onto the bed next to Mulder, ignoring the box springs’ wail of agony. In the room above them, a rhythmic thumping had begun, and the distinct slap of a human body against the wall where a headboard should be.  _Should be_ , thought Scully, shifting the pillows that lay between her stiff neck and the wall.

 

Mulder smirked at her over the case file. “Our neighbors seem to be enjoying themselves.”

 

She cocked an eyebrow. “Clearly.”

 

“What do you think Ricky and Christy are like in bed?”

“Shut up for a few seconds and you’ll find out.”

 

Mulder paused; then a familiar shit-eating grin came over his face. “I bet Ricky uses too much hair gel. And he speaks with a fake French accent when he’s ordering at fancy restaurants.”

 

Scully couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled out of her, though she knew it’d only encourage him. She covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her giggles but snorted instead. Predictably, Mulder grinned wider.

 

“He probably drives a Ferrari or something,” he continued. “Bet he comes without her and then doesn’t offer to help her finish.”

 

“Bet he expects head but doesn’t receive it,” added Scully. Two could play this game.

 

“Maybe Christy is a call girl.”

 

Scully shook her head. “Oh no,” she replied, “my money is on a mistress. A guy who can pay a fancy call girl will take her to a nicer hotel. He doesn’t want to have sex on a bed like this. He wants room service and alcohol that doesn’t taste like battery acid.”

 

“Point taken.”

 

Ricky-from-upstairs groaned loudly, as the thumping ceased to silence. Then—  _Jesus, Christy, that was fuckin’ awesome. What do you say we have some food delivered?_

 

Scully snorted.

 

“Called it,” said Mulder. “What a guy he must be, huh?”

 

“Real charmer,” Scully muttered, adjusting the lumpy pillows.

 

“A real gentleman sees to his lady’s pleasure as much as his own.”

 

A blush crept up Scully’s cheeks. Oh, she could attest to Mulder’s gentlemanly streak, as of that very afternoon. What a day, what an orgasm, in the back of their cramped rental car. They’d vowed to repeat it as they came down from the high, but since they had arrived Mulder had danced carefully around their wine-rich, roadside liaison. Scully had followed suit, unsure how to broach the subject of their relationship. What, exactly were they?  _I love you_ , he had vowed as he pulled out of her, and she had returned the sentiment while she was pulling up her panties. She couldn’t quite decide whether the sex they had in cactus country was a sordid exercise in pent-up lust or the most romantic experience of her life.

 

She drank in the silence, feeling Mulder’s eyes on her. Even with her newly-acquired desert tan, she blushed crimson. He had to have noticed. She glanced at the gap in her robe, her cleavage just peeking through. She snuck a look at Mulder, and oh, he was rock hard. Shirtless, in his boxers, his erection tenting the sheets. A rush of heat went straight to her clit, and she could feel the sticky-wet cling of her undergarments.

 

“Hey Scully.” His voice dropped half an octave, chocolate-rich and seductive. “What do you say we give our noisy neighbors a run for their money?” It was Mulder’s idea. She would cite it when the next morning, the man next door shot them a withering glare on his way to breakfast.

 

If once that would have embarassed her, though, it didn’t anymore. Her modesty vanished as soon as she saw him hard and waiting for her, that puppy-smile and plump lower lip begging to be kissed. “We can give them more than a run for their money, Mulder,” she purred. “Christy didn’t even come.”

 

“Maybe a lesson in female pleasure then?” He inched toward her, shifting his body so his lips were inches from hers, and it took all of her willpower not to close that distance in an instant.

 

“Yes,” she breathed, “absolutely,” and pressed her lips to his, moving desperately against him. She felt his hands instinctively thread through her damp hair, and she leaned into him, bending into his body until her breasts tumbled from her robe.

 

Mulder’s lips left hers, trailed down her neck until he took her pert nipple in his mouth, kissed the smooth line where her tan met her ripe breast. She whimpered, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and clenching her muscles like her body might dissemble if she let go. She felt like an automaton, all screws and gears wiring her tight to him.

 

Then his mouth traced lower, and his fingers slid from her hair to her hips, untying the belt of her bathrobe and exposing her to the lamplight. He slid her panties down to her knees, gazing at her from where he had positioned his body between her legs. His eyes darkened the color of molasses as he inched toward her sex, and she squirmed against him, thighs clenching, trying not to squeeze her legs together just to feel the friction.

 

“Mulder,” she whispered, as his tongue grazed her clit. She could feel her voice go hoarse with arousal. “Mulder, yes.”

 

“Oh, Scully,” he teased, “you can be louder than that. Our friends upstairs can’t say anything about it.”

 

He dipped his tongue into her center, and she arched her back, pushing her pelvis into him as a wave of pleasure overcame her. She moaned, thick and gutteral. “Oh God, Mulder.” As he refocused his attentions on her clit, his teeth grazing ticklishly over her labia and his right hand cushioning her ass, she cried out. “Right there,” she said through gritted teeth, “please, Mulder, right there.”

 

He listened, and God she could feel just how swollen and ready she already was around his tongue. The way every time his lips met her folds, a hot jolt coursed through her. She could feel herself clench and release, knew she was teetering on the edge of an orgasm, so she pressed her hand against the top of his head.

 

“Stop.”

 

Mulder raised his head, confused, and the sight of him messy-haired with her wetness shining on his lips was nearly enough to make come on the spot. She sat up and reached for the bulge in his boxers, cupping it with a sly smirk so that Mulder groaned at her touch. If he hadn’t realized why Scully had stopped him, he did now.

 

“I need you inside me,” Scully pleaded. “Now.”

 

Mulder nodded frantically, incapable of speech with her hand on his cock, and dropped his boxers to the floor. Scully eyed him for a moment, relishing the view she hadn’t taken time to appreciate earlier in the day, before she sprawled back against the pillows and opened her legs for him. The idea of them railing loudly against the wall, backs thumping and limbs slapping the orange paint was indescribably hot, it was time to make that a reality.

 

Mulder entered her slowly, gently at first, wrapping her legs around his waist as she pulled him toward her. She rested her forehead against his for a moment, feeling him half inside of her, feeling her clit throb from touch of him only moments before.

 

“Hi,” she whispered, bumping her nose against his.

 

He smiled, his eyes crinkling warmly. “Hi Scully.”

 

She wiggled her hips, and Mulder thrust into her until she couldn’t tell where she ended and he began, and it had only been a few hours but somehow she had forgotten  _just how good it_ _felt_. They set a rhythm with ease, picking up the pace within seconds because Scully knew he was just as close as she was, too close to drag this out. Her bumped the wall, a  _thump_  that sounded distinctly louder and more pleasurable than whatever their neighbors were doing earlier.

 

“Scully you feel so good,” Mulder thrust into her once again, “I can’t explain.”

 

Her chest heaved against him; her taut nipples grazed beads of sweat on his skin. “Call it,” she panted, “an X-file— _Fuck_ Mulder I’m going to come.”

 

“Should I pull—”

 

“ _No_ , no, remember it doesn’t—” her sentence cut off abruptly as she rolled her head back and lost herself in him.

 

Their breaths came in short gasps; Scully could feel their skin stick to itself, stick to each other they’d bathed in honey. She buried her face in his neck as her orgasm overtook her, her shoulders shuddering. Even so, she cried out, a high breathy cry of ecstasy.

 

Seconds later, Mulder called her name like he was invoking a deity. He pressed his hand against the wall and held her close with one arm. She rested there, soft and sated, with Mulder still inside of her. He enveloped her like a forest canopy, shielding her momentarily from the glaring light of the world outside their motel room.

 

“You are so incredibly beautiful Scully,” he mumbled and pressed his lips to her hair. A pause. “And more than that, you are wise and intelligent and so very crafty when you want to be…” he trailed off.

 

“Ditto,” she said in response. “You and your wild theories and dramatic slideshows, your brilliant impossible mind. Not to mention you’re a very attentive lover.”

 

Lover. It seemed like the appropriate word to describe them. ‘Boyfriend’ was too cheesy; it reeked of her undergrad years and undersold their passion. ‘Partner’ may have suited them, if they hadn’t spent seven years as ‘just partners’ in the Hoover basement.

 

“I pride myself on it,” Mulder chuckled, “my attentiveness to my lover’s needs, that is.” Lover it would be, then. She wasn’t complaining.

 

Mulder pulled out, and she curled up on the bed, fitting into him perfectly even now. He spooned her gently, his thumb rubbing tiny circles on her shoulder. The top of her head tucked into his chin. His breathing had slowed, until it became a hushed, even sound. Scully listened to it for a few moments as the evening’s events truly sank in. At last, she let the ceiling turn to stars, dissolve before her eyes and give way to contented sleep.


	3. Old Classics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set during Season 11, Mulder and Scully relive their glory days when eighties love songs come on the radio.

She always thought of Idaho as a flyover state. A endless expanse of hay bails and silver-bearded men wearing flannel, more cows than people and more deer than cows. The perfect ambience for a UFO abduction.

 

Their destination is somewhere on a horizon that vanished with the Idaho sun. It blazed like a tangerine in the rearview mirror, then cast them into darkness between the Sawtooth mountains and the fields of Asphodel.

 

Now, they’re half way to dawn.

 

Scully drives through starlight with her brights on, the silence thickening as time goes on. They’re two hours out of the mountains, rolling past rotted fences and trading places in the driver’s seat to catch some semblance of a good night’s sleep. When Mulder drives, Scully dozes off, but now that she’s at the wheel, Mulder stares out his window as if he’s expecting Sasquatch to leap in front of their car. Twenty-five years and he still has trouble sleeping on the road.

 

She yawns loudly and drums her fingers on the wheel. She used to be able to drive all night, hundreds of miles down foggy interstates running solely on coffee. She’s older now; by midnight, exhaustion seeps into her bones, and her eyelids begin to sag.

 

“Do you want me to drive?” Mulder mumbles from the passenger seat.

 

“No, I’ll be fine. Maybe we should put on the radio, though,” she admits. She presses a button on the speakers that she thinks might (possibly) be a power button.

 

“Doesn’t this car have a phone-cord or something?” asks Mulder when the speaker scratches to life, white noise intermixed with the occasional piano note.

 

“Probably, but I can’t find it.” Even if she could, she doubts he’d be too thrilled to listen to her collection of NPR podcasts, and Mulder’s taste in music isn’t especially appealing on late night drives.

 

So she flicks through the radio channels until she finds something tolerable. “Knock Three Times” reverberates inappropriately through the shadows. The pitch of fake trumpets fills the car, and Mulder chuckles quietly.

 

“This was one of those songs you loved until you hated,” he informs her with a smile. He runs his hand over his salt and pepper stubble and looks up at her with eyes like little planets, lit warmly from a million miles away.

 

Scully snorts. “I feel like they played this song at my high school homecoming.” It’s bad, but it’s the fun kind of bad. Finally distant enough to be nostalgic, reminders of high school make her sigh rather than cringe.

 

As the unforgettable chorus fades into silence, a radio host with a coarser voice than CGB Spender hacks gutterally into the microphone.  _Folks, this is channel 91.5, Old Classics. We’ll be right back after these brief advertisements._

 

“Old Classics,” she repeats aloud. That’s what they are—old, sure, but they’re still kicking. And maybe, she hopes, they’re en route to a comeback.

 

Mulder sits up and stretches as much as he can in the Taurus’s passenger seat. He is all rumples and loose limbs after six hours in the car. “Sounds about right,” he concedes with a grunt.

 

The Honda ad dies out, and a cheerful keyboard riff startles her back to reality. It’s the electric-disco kind of riff, and the song is on the tip of her tongue, ringing like the soundtrack of a too-emotional porno. It’s only as the lyrics ring out, and the Taurus starts to feel thick and stuffy, that she recognizes it:

 

 _I can’t fight this feeling anymoooooooore,_  the stereo belts like a punch in the gut. Scully stiffens, gripping the wheel for dear life, and sneaks a glance at Mulder in her peripheral. He looks as uncomfortable as she feels, squirming in his seat and staring resolutely out the window.

 

_It’s time to bring this ship into the shoooooooore._

 

Shit, she’s not prepared for this. She is reminded, completely out of left field (maybe not completely if she’s being honest), of the first time they had sex. They took a sledgehammer to six years of sexual tension in a car not unlike this one. A rental car, putting its way through fields of juniper. They topped off the encounter with even better sex in their shittiest motel to date.

 

“Do you remember—” she stops herself, but it’s too late. The words are out of her mouth. “Do you remember that Mexican restaurant, the one in Scipio Utah where I ordered a margarita, and then we…” she can’t finish. Fucked in the backseat because they just couldn’t stand it anymore, because it was a hundred and two degrees, and they were in their thirties and still had the stamina for wild, shirt-ripping sex.

 

“Eduardo’s,” says Mulder, sitting up straight again.

 

“What?”

 

“Eduardo’s Authentic Mexican Drive-in. That’s where we stopped to eat. There was a petting zoo next door. What a day, am I right Scully?” he jokes awkwardly. “I guess we just couldn’t fight that feeling.”

 

She pretend-laughs to cut the tension. Inside, she’s all butterflies and wooden limbs. She’s not sure what it says about their relationship that Mulder remembers the name of Eduardo’s. She’s not sure what it says that she’s forgotten. She remembers that margarita, though—an alien green concoction of ice chips and cheap cocktail mix, and she  _definitely_  remembers the way Mulder’s eyes grazed her entire body as he sipped it with a plastic straw.

 

The radio croons again. _I can’t fight this feeling anymore…._

 

She ignores the heat between her legs and the blush creeping up her cheeks. She ignores the way Mulder’s stare bores into the side of her head, waiting for her to say something.

 

“We were so young back then,” she sighs. It’s a cop-out line, but that doesn’t make it untrue. They’re aging with the car radio—loud and relevant, but only in the middle of clusterfuck nowhere. They dance expertly in the cobwebby corners of life, where people still don’t have cell service. Where fairy tales thrive, and landline gossip births monsters, and the basement is an appropriate place to make love.

 

She watches Mulder’s lips twitch. When was the last time they had sex? It must have been six years ago, that awkward limbo after she’d left him but was still listed as his attending physician. She checked his physical health, cried in the master bathroom at the sight of him, then polished off his wine and let him fuck her on the decrepit couch he’d owned since 1994. The one stained with his cum and her beer and their son’s spit-up.

 

They fucked like orgasms were a currency, and somehow it was rough and underwhelming at the same time. They panted into the musty air, not daring to speak each other’s name. They came silently, and when the transaction was finished she left just the same, tearing half-dressed out of their—his—driveway. It felt like a one-night stand in undergrad, the thought of it more enticing than the execution. She found him a new physician by the end of that week.

 

“Scully?”

 

“What?” Scully snips, and her features soften when he recoils like hurt puppy. “Sorry,” she says, “I’m just stressed.” The exhausted drag of her own voice alarms her. She sighs again. That damned song is still playing, relentlessly goading them with their youth.

 

“In the old days car trips relaxed you.”

 

“In the good old days, Mulder, I didn’t tell you how much I hated night driving. In the good old days you probably wouldn’t have asked.”

 

“In the good old days, we would have pulled over here,” Mulder murmurs under his breath.

 

In the good old days, her hips wouldn’t have ached after sex; she was wetter and softer more pliable. Still, she taps her finger on the wheel. Still, she squeezes her thighs together and feels her sex tingle. Still, she wants him. Not like six years ago, just trying to pound out the pain. No, she wants him with the wrinkles he has aquired in her absence and the back-aches they’ll undoubtedly suffer in the morning. She’s not seeking in him the ghost of Mulder in 1998, but loving the flesh-and-blood Mulder of 2018. Falling in love with him, all over again.

 

_I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for._

 

“Do you want to have sex?” If not now, when? The universe grants these moments sparingly. They wasted one already, thanks to a goddamn bee, and it was another year before they talked about it like honest adults.

 

Mulder’s eyebrows shoot up, and he eyes her skeptically. Speedwagon wails obnoxiously; he adjusts his tie and tries to discern if she’s just messing with him. “Aren’t we a little old for that?”

 

“Yes,” she says simply. She licks her lips, lets her voice go husky. “But Mulder…” she croons. It rolls off her tongue in a lilt she hasn’t used since they called themselves ‘platonic.’ Back when they fucked with words, and she could get him hard just by saying his name because she didn’t dare go further than that.

 

The ensuing silence might be suspenseful, were it not for the building chorus of  _can’t fight this feelin’ anymore_  that she’s afraid to turn off. Once the song ends, she’ll have to fill the quiet and acknowledge how badly she needs him. Not just here, now, but tomorrow in the hotel room and at home when the case is finished and over and over until they die.

 

“I’ll pull over,” she whispers before he can respond. She stops in a dirt pullout, basking in the utter darkness as her headlights go out. She turns off the car, and that stupid song cuts off before it can hit the final note. When it’s quiet— “I mean it, Mulder.”

 

“The last time we—”

 

“This isn’t like that time,” Scully interrupts. “I’m not talking about a one night stand. I’m saying, let’s have sex in the car and then… go from there.”

 

She can see the hurt in his eyes as he recalls their lackluster final tryst in the unremarkable house, and tries not to be offended. It hurt her too, fishing around the living room carpet for her underwear and then leaving him again. It was the only time she ever regretted sleeping with him, and it took her months of hindsight to realize the damage it had done to them both.

 

“I hope you know how much I love you, Scully.” His voice cracks.

 

She gazes at him with earnest owl’s eyes, skillfully fighting the urge to cry. “I’m working on it.”

 

Mulder reaches over to turn off the car. His hand skims hers, fingers interlacing. “Are you sure, Scully?” he asks, stroking her palm with this callused thumb. “We’re not exactly the young handsome spitfires we were the first time.”

 

Scully leans over until her forehead rests against his, twisted awkwardly against her seatbelt. Inhaling the smell of chocolate on his breath, she says solemnly, “that’s the point.”

 

When he kisses her, it’s sweet and ponderous, a weirdly new sensation. His lips stand out like a refurbished antique. They are Mulder and Scully, but they’ve replaced every skin cell since the last time they kissed like this; they have rearranged their atoms into new molds. She likes it.

 

She pushes the lever on the passenger seat and chuckles as it slides backward, leaving them an open space in the front. She crawls recklessly over the emergency break to kneel over him, still fighting to keep his lips on hers and his tongue on her teeth. She cups his cheek, lets her fingers drift across the old scar on his temple where she once stitched him up in her kitchen. She moves to kiss the smile lines around his cheeks, the wrinkles in his forehead, studying the his skin like it’s a well-worn paperback.  _Gone with the Wind_  or  _Pride and Prejudice,_  or some other intersection of the tender and the passionate.

 

That’s the real difference, she thinks as Mulder lifts her t-shirt and unclasps her bra. Before, they flickered between frantic fucking and fragile lovemaking. Sticky and transgressive, or moving together like their bed was made of fine China. Now is something in between.

 

Mulder’s lips expertly trace the peak of her nipple, and she arches her back against him. She lets him brush feather-light over her breasts with well-trained hands, cupping them like holy water and memorizing the face that 2018, fifty-four and fighting Scully makes when she loses herself in arousal.

 

She adjusts her position on Mulder’s lap and bumps his nose out of the way to kiss him again. He grunts as she kneels on either side of his legs, his erection grazing the crotch of her slacks. Just to tease, she grinds against him fully clothed, and he groans into her lips. He reaches for his belt buckle, but she stops him.

 

“Not yet,” she whispers. “It’s not about that, not yet.”

 

It is her way of demanding,  _make love to me Mulder_ , rather than  _fuck me_ , because she’s not ready to say it outright, not just yet. She didn’t just stop the car to slice their sexual tension and have a quick, desperate romp in the back. She could’ve waited hours for him, and they could have fucked on clean hotel sheets after a bottle of Merlot. But it’s not about that.

 

Mulder’s lips linger on her, marking her breast scarlet and moving on to her collarbone. She rests her head on his shoulder, hiding the pleasure on her face and giving him access to the soft skin of her neck. Mulder leaves hickeys as spectacular as Scully did in high school, when the concept of making out was groundbreaking.

 

He holds her tenderly; even his cock— restricted in slacks, grinding against her, is subdued, languid. They cannot move as frantically as they did when they were young. They won’t even move to the back seat; she’ll make love to him here. She has planned this already, if she’s being honest.

 

She pulls a lever on the seat. The back and headrest slowly lower, until the Taurus’s passenger seat offers them ample space. Mulder lays back on it, tie undone, shirt untucked. Pants tight. His erection strains against the zipper.

 

Scully fumbles to remove her slacks, curled up between Mulder’s outstretched legs as she struggles with the black, pinstriped beast. Her boots are strewn God knows where, and the pants are sticking to her thigh like latex, and wasn’t she wearing a skirt last time? She mentally applauds 1999 Dana Scully for having the foresight to wear a pencil skirt that fateful day in the desert.

 

Finally stripping off her pants, she tugs open Mulder’s fly with trembling fingers and draws him out, sliding her hand along the length of him and savoring the groan that escapes his lips. She strokes him slowly, doesn’t spring any surprises. It’s the softest handjob she’s ever given, but she doesn’t expect him to come before the main event.

 

“Scully,” he murmurs, “You need to stop soon…. if you want me…. to last.”

 

She releases him with a wry smirk. “Fair enough.”

 

Then Mulder’s mouth is on hers again, searching her lips for 1999. But Dana Scully doesn’t taste like cigarettes and strawberry chapstick anymore; she tastes like Green tea and spearmint gum. And if Mulder once tasted like black coffee with Altoids, now he tastes like coffee with too much sugar. He has softened; she has hardened. Scully doesn’t mind the change, but it takes Mulder a few seconds to adjust to the woman he’s kissing now, whose cotton-smooth skin has weathered elegantly. Whose once-cheeky profile has turned stern and dangerous.

 

The way Mulder looks at her when he pulls away… she feels the years. But if the sexuality of her youth has vanished, in its place has grown something brazen, mature. She finagles her way out of the soft scarlet thing between Mulder and her pussy. There’s smoke in his eyes, and her body bares itself before him like hot steel. Sure, they’re not humping raggedly in the backseat, but she’ll ride him slow and heavy and press her forehead to his when he comes in her, and what it lacks in vigor it makes up for in devotion.

 

She kneels over him, hovering on the tip of his cock, gripping fistfuls of his shirt to keep from quivering. For a second, he picks at his buttons and tries to rid himself of the only article of clothing not rumpled about the car, but she gently guides his hand back to her hip. It sits on the sharp knob of her pelvic bone, his other hand curled around her neck. He laces his fingers through her ruffled hair. She takes him inside her with frustrating patience. In their years apart, she forgot the feeling of him moving within her, the unique sensation of  _Fox Mulder_. It floods back to her now, as she hits bottom with the  _smack_  of her ass against his thighs and her thighs against his hips.

 

“Mulderrrrr…” she keens, tucking her face into the crook of his neck and using his shoulders to push herself up. She raises her hips and rocks, before allowing him to thrust fully into her once more. He moans, and she can feel his chest rumble like the purr of a lion. The more she moves, the stickier they become, melding together and peeling apart. Two clay creatures, carved from the same mold and animated vibrantly.

 

As he falls into their rhythm, leisurely thrusting in and out of her, she reacquaints herself  with his body. Her tongue dips between his pectorals and up to the hollow of his clavicle. She sucks the tender skin and winds her fingers into his hair. A cry escapes her as he presses against her clit, and a wave of sensation courses through her. She runs appreciative hands down his abdominals, dances down them like a piano exercise and drags two fingers down his V to feel it bow and flex with every thrust of his hips.

 

As she picks up the pace, she disentangles herself from his body and reaches between them to press against her clit. Her partner is all pent-up sexual frustration, and he won’t last. She can already feel Mulder’s arms tighten around her. His fists clench and dig into the muscles rippling along her spine. She lets out a high-pitched whimper when Mulder follows her lead and cups her hand in his own. He traces quick circles over her clit with his thumb, and she can see the grin on his face as her breaths turn to shallow pants. His fingers are relentless, his rhythm constant. She mewls a yearning, erotic thing, a sound her vocal chords haven’t been able to form in decades. Her knees bore lasting dents in the Taurus’s seat.

 

Mulder shudders beneath her weight with a husky moan, his shoulders falling against the backrest. To his credit, he pumps her with this hands while his cock stills and she continues to tighten around him. He drags across her swollen labia, pulses her clit for a few seconds until she seizes. He coaxes every second of sensation out of her, rocking his hips to side to side to keep the friction going. She opens her lips, tosses her head back like a wolf to the full moon and breathes. And breathes, and breathes, in rapturous little gasps. Her chest heaves, fresh freckles and crucifix bared before Mulder’s awestruck eyes. She bites her lip so hard she can taste blood.

 

“That’s my girl,” he murmurs into her hair, “that’s my Scully. Fuck, you’re so beautiful when you come, Scully.” He says her name like he can’t believe it’s on his tongue.

 

Finally, she settles. She doesn’t climb off of him, not just yet. He plays with the cross around her neck and then her loose hair and then her nipple. He entertains them both while they catch their breath. She observes him, expectant, until he’s ready to talk.

 

“That was really something, Scully.”

 

She nods slowly. “Yeah. I missed you more than I care to admit.”

 

His eyebrows shoot up. That’s  _her_  patented look, excuse him. “Big Spooky or Little Spooky?”

 

She giggles. It’s been too long since she’s done that, too. “Both of you.” Little Spooky isn’t all that little, but Mulder’s ego certainly doesn’t need her to reaffirm how well endowed he is.

 

“In all seriousness though, Scully, I missed you too. I missed this, but most of all I missed having you by my side.”

 

It’s ‘by my side’ that almost makes her cry. He wants her next to him, not hanging back in a morgue or ditched on a whim for some half-baked lead. She would march to the Underworld with Fox Mulder if the alternative was to sit by the ferry and wait for his return.

 

“You have me now,” she promises softly, brushing a strand of her own hair off his cheeks. “Do I have you?”

 

“I can’t remember a time you didn’t.” He offers her a radiant smile. Scully welcomes it.

 

She kisses him chastely and extracts herself from his lap, back into the driver’s seat. Mulder passes her her button-up, panties, and a scratchy blanket he snatched from the backseat. She finagles the underwear over her legs and buttons up her shirt. She wraps herself in the blanket as Mulder dresses.

 

“All these years,” he muses, zipping up his fly, “and we finally have a song.”

 

“Mulder, “Can’t Fight this Feeling” is not our song.”

 

“It is,” he insists. “This song inspired a romantic escapade.”

 

“Maybe it did, but Speedwagon is eighties rock. It’s metallic and objectively bad.” She rolls her eyes and steps on the gas. The car roars to life, the radio once again blasting static. They’ll have to pull into the next rest stop, so Scully can pee. Theoretically, she could wait until sunrise, the comforting privacy of their hotel room. She’d waited that long before. But she shouldn’t have to.

 

“Scully… where do we go from here?”

 

She asked him that once, in a post-coital haze, curled up in a dingy Utah motel. It’s possible she has something to prove when she makes love to him for the time in years on the side of the road. Like the first time, it’s a fresh start. It’s not the same as when they were young; they can’t stomach shit margaritas or bear the desert heat.  _We’ll figure it out,_  he promised back then. It’s what they always do at a crossroads, after their foundations quake and their lives shift irreversibly.

 

She watches him lazily, tries for nonchalant but can’t choke back the emotion. “We’re figuring it out.”

 

Mulder accepts this answer. Laying his head against the windowsill, he sleepily hums “Can’t Fight this Feeling” under his breath. Scully drives. She drives until the pitch darkness of Idaho swallows them and drives until it spits them back up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prompt is from kateyes224 on Tumblr, who posted about “Can’t Fight This Feeling” coming on the radio while Mulder and Scully are on some dusty, two-lane highway. 
> 
> I let my porn get emotional again.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: Scipio is a real town with a real petting zoo. I've seen it with my own eyes. No Mexican drive-in, though. 
> 
> Title of this work comes from the song "The Attractions of Youth" by Barns Courtney. This is part of my ongoing project, a collection of unrelated stories named after every song in his album of the same name.


End file.
